All Chapters of CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40



Tyler’s mouth is warm and unhurried and he kisses me like he has nowhere else to be, one hand light at my jaw, and I let myself be here in it, in this porch light with this boy who brought me sunflowers and called ahead for a good table and asked what I was building like the answer mattered.


It felt nice to be seen.


When I pull back he’s smiling.


“Next weekend?” he says.


“Seven o’clock,” I say.


He waits until I’m inside before he drives away.


I close the door and stand in the hallway for a moment. The sunflowers are still in their glass on the table, bright and yellow in the dim light, and the evening is still warm in my chest and I am standing here in the quiet of a house that doesn’t know what to do with me yet, and for once I don’t mind.


Then the front door opens behind me.


Cain.


He stops when he sees me. Then his eyes drop to the sunflowers on the table and he looks at them for a long moment, long enough that I know he sees them, long enough that I know he know

The cafeteria is loud and smells like reheated oil and Daniel is explaining the project split for the third time because I keep losing the thread of what he’s saying. 
Daniel Park apologizes before he says anything remotely inconvenient. Sorry, but I think you might have the wrong textbook. Sorry, but the deadline moved to Friday. Sorry, but you have ink on your cheek right now. He’d handed me a napkin without making it weird and I’d decided then that he was one of the few genuinely decent people in this building. 
We’ve been partners for a class project for two weeks and he still taps his pen between every sentence like his hands need something to do when he’s thinking, and I’ve stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing the hum of an air conditioner. It’s just part of how he works. 
“So I take sources one through three,” he says, pen tapping against the edge of his notebook, “and you take four and five. Does that split work for you?”
“Yeah. That’s fine.” 
“Cool.” Tap. “Sorry

The thing about Cain’s words is that they don’t leave.
I’ve been turning them over since yesterday like something I found that I don’t have a name for. I shouldn’t want my stepsister. Not I don’t want you. Not this is nothing. Shouldn’t. Present tense. Active. Like wanting me is something he’s still doing while knowing he shouldn’t be.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know what to do with any of him. Every time I think I have him categorized, cold, calculating, just a body wanting another body, he says something that doesn’t fit. Does something that doesn’t fit. And then he walks away and I’m left standing there trying to make the pieces go back to where they were before he opened his mouth.
Nothing about Cain Russo is ever straightforward. I don’t know why I keep expecting it to be.
Tyler is already waiting at the corner where the science block meets the main building. He sees me coming and his whole face does that thing it does, open and easy and warm in a way that





Tyler asked three times before I said yes.
The first time I said I was tired. The second time I said I had reading. The third time he sat on the edge of my desk and looked at me and said you’ve been somewhere else all week and I said okay because he wasn’t wrong and because I was tired of going to bed early and lying in the dark turning eleven words over and over like something I couldn’t put down.


If I hated you I wouldn’t fuck you like that.


I hated that just few words from Cain could affect me this much. 


I pull on the dress. Fix my hair. Go downstairs.


The party is loud and warm and Tyler’s hand sits at my waist and I let him steer because it’s easier than thinking. He says something near my ear and I laugh at the right moment and take whatever is in the first cup someone hands me.


The living room has been cleared. Coffee table pushed back, a loose circle on the floor, maybe twelve people. Tyler spots Mike and Mike waves and I let Tyler pull me down into the circle b

My chest pulls tight at her words.
"And you told that room I found it." Still that voice. Completely even. "That I sent it to you. That I said it might be useful someday."
Sienna's jaw tightens. "Yes."
"Why."
"You know why."
"Say it."
"Cain—"
"Say it out loud. Right now. To my face."
Something cracks in her expression. Her composure peeling back, and what's underneath it comes through hot and raw and completely unmanaged.
"Because I am tired." The words come out fast. Too fast, like they've been pressurized for months. "I am so tired of standing next to you and being invisible. Two years. Two years I have been with you and you have never once looked at me the way you look at her." Her voice is rising and she doesn't seem to care who hears it.
"Sienna—"
"No." She steps toward him. "You don't get to say my name like that. Like you're trying to calm me down. Like I'm being unreasonable." Her eyes are bright and furious and something beneath the fury is cracking wide open.
"Sh